Thursday, December 30, 2004

WSJ.com - Personal Technology: Security, Cool Features Of Firefox Web Browser Beat Microsoft's IE: "Microsoft's Internet Explorer Web browser is one of the most important, and most often used, programs on the world's personal computers, relied upon by more than 90% of Windows users. But Microsoft hasn't made any important functional improvements in Internet Explorer for years.
The software giant has folded IE into the Windows operating system, and the browser only receives updates as part of the 'Windows update' process. In recent years, most upgrades to IE have been under-the-hood patches to plug the many security holes that have made IE a major conduit for hackers, virus writers and spyware purveyors. The only visible feature added to IE recently: a pop-up ad blocker, which arrived long after other browsers had one.
...
Luckily, even if you switch to Firefox, you can still keep IE around to view just these incompatible sites. (In fact, Microsoft makes it impossible to fully uninstall IE.) There's even an extension for Firefox that adds an option called "View This Page in IE."
So Firefox is my current choice of a Windows Web browser. It is to IE in 2004 what IE was to Netscape in 1996 -- the upstart that does a better job."

Generous of Walt Mossberg to also give honorable mention to Safari, Opera, and Netscape, but many software vendors I've spoken with recently have suggested the non-IE/non-Firefox browsers are being eliminated by Firefox (and of course Netscape is based on Firefox).